Offhand I’d suspect a finicky adapter. Does the adapter work with other disks? Does the disk work when plugged into a server/computer directly?

Assuming it’s the adapter being finicky - did you happen to try using other USB cables with the adapter?

When plugging into the system - Does the dmesg output display anything else useful, any warnings or anything? I would have thought it would give you the USB drive chipset vendor/model, I didn’t think Sabrent builds their own chipsets but could be wrong.

Also would try doing a smartctl --scan followed by a smartctl -a /dev/YOUR-EXTERNAL-DRIVE and see what comes up. (those are part of smartmontools)